teacher and six young students wearing red hats inside a greenhouse looking at plants

To reach their full potential, children need high-quality health care and services—especially in life’s early years. Health promotion, safety, disease prevention, and early identification and treatment during these earliest years lay the foundation for healthy development.

Mounting evidence that health during childhood sets the stage for adult health creates an important ethical, social, and economic imperative to ensure that all children are as healthy as they can be. Healthy children are more likely to become healthy adults. FPG's scientists study many aspects of child health and development—from prenatal health to infant brain development to stress management in adolescents.

Featured Person

Melanie Livet, PhD, is a senior research scientist at the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG), the co-director of FPG's National Implementation Research Network (NIRN), and the implementation research lead and healthcare/public health Lead at NIRN. She has also held a faculty position with the UNC Eshelman School Pharmacy Division of Practice Advancement and Clinical Education (PACE) since September 2016. Livet has more than 20 years of experience in applied research, with a focus on implementation science, program evaluation, and technology validation. Her areas of interest include application and evaluation of implementation science practices and tools through use of mixed methods, capacity building and organizational readiness strategies, adaptation and sustainability of evidence-based interventions, implementation research methodologies, and web-based technologies to support effective transfer of evidence-based practices into service settings.

Featured Research Project

The Mental Health, Earlier (MHE) ALACRITY Research Center aims to develop novel clinician and system-level strategies to advance equitable implementation of early mental health interventions in pediatric primary care, address the unique needs of diverse communities for early mental health promotion via caregiver engagement strategies that are family-based, culturally-grounded, and accessible, and create a scientific and workforce development program as a national resource for equitable implementation of early childhood mental health innovations in pediatric primary care.

Current Projects

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Demonstration of Limited Intermediary Supports Focused on the North Carolina Triple P System
NC DHHS’s Division of Child and Family Wellbeing (DCFW) and the Impact Center at the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute are partnering to initiate and demonstrate over two years a set of limited intermediary supports focused on the North Carolina Triple P System. Building on the DCFW’s recent set of investments in child and youth behavioral health and conversations between the Impact Center and DCFW about DCFW’s priorities and identified needs, the intermediary supports will specifically focus on: strengthening evaluation activities, system structures and practices, and model fidelity within North Carolina Triple P and generally, accelerating the use of evidence (both research evidence and practice-based evidence) in decision-making and programmatic and support activities.
Early Life Adversity and the Developmental Programming of Neurocognitive and Behavioral Risk: A Longitudinal Investigation of Early Childhood Telomere Biology
This study will examine the early biological embedding of health and disease risk in young children’s telomeres, a biomarker of cellular aging. We will conduct a novel longitudinal study to examine the effects of prenatal and postnatal early life adversity (i.e., poverty, parent conflict, maternal stress) on accelerated biological aging, including telomere erosion and epigenetic aging clocks, across the first three years of life.
Equity Research Action Coalition
Exploring legal status and race as determinants of Black immigrant maternal health
In collaboration with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and African Family Health Organization, community-based organizations that engage and educate African American and Black immigrant communities, we will conduct an exploratory sequential mixed-methods research to identify barriers and facilitators to positive birth outcomes for Black mothers with a focus on attention to health care access through focus groups and interviews and conduct causal inference analyses using extant data (i.e., Vital Statistics) to examine the effect of 2009 Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act on the birthing outcomes of Black immigrants.
Implementation Support for an AIFs-aligned Family Ways Roadmap
The purpose of this project is for the National Implementation Research Network (NIRN) to partner with the King County Public Health Department to support the development of a comprehensive implementation guide for Family Ways that is aligned with the Active Implementation Frameworks (AIFs).
Independent Study of Maryland's Online IFSP and MOIEP Systems
This project will evaluate Maryland’s online individualized family service plan (IFSP) and online individualized education program (IEP) systems. Specifically, the project aims to understand whether these systems effectively support children and students with disabilities, align with federal and state requirements, and meet the needs of their end-users. Evaluation activities will include conducting 80 interviews, facilitating at least 10 focus groups, and hosting four family listening sessions across systems.
Mental Health, Earlier (MHE) ALACRITY Research Center
The Mental Health, Earlier ALACRITY Research Center addresses a key element of the NIMH 2020-2025 Strategic Plan Goal 3: Strive for Prevention and Cures: advancing preventive interventions in a developmentally appropriate manner as early in life and illness course as possible, to prevent or forestall mental illnesses and associated dysfunction.
The California Abundant Birth Project Evaluation: Advancing Birth Equity Through Guaranteed Income for Pregnant People
The California Abundant Birth Project (CA-ABP) is a guaranteed income program for pregnant people at greatest risk of birth inequities in five California counties (San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Riverside, and Los Angeles), funded by the State of California, municipal governments, and philanthropic funding. The California Abundant Birth Project will provide unconditional, monthly income supplements during pregnancy and postpartum to randomly selected participants, with the goal of curbing financial stress and promoting healthy pregnancy outcomes. The goal of this project is to evaluate the impact of this guaranteed income program on birthing outcomes, maternal and child health, and children’s early outcomes.
Types of green spaces and the development of anxiety, depression, and ADHD in rural, low-income communities
The mental health of children in the United States is a national emergency, with notable and accelerating rates of anxiety, depression, and ADHD. Recent research suggests exposure to natural environments (green spaces) reduces risk for these disorders, alleviating stress, restoring emotional and physiologic resources, providing opportunities to build regulatory skills through risky play and physical activity, and reducing harm from environmental stressors, such as heat. Drawing from 18 years of observational, survey, and medical record data gathered from The Family Life Project, a population-based study of 1,292 children born in low-income, rural communities, the project will derive new, remotely-sensed, geospatial measures of types of greenspaces around children’s residences, and integrate these measures with extensive child, family, and home data from 2 months to 16-18 years of age to address critical questions about the types and timing of green space exposures that offset risk for anxiety, depression, and ADHD.
Understanding Mental and Behavioral Health in Head Start
The purpose of this project, in partnership with Mathematica-MPR, is to understand the landscape of program structures and supports for mental and behavioral health in Early Head Start/Head Start for children, families, and staff. To accomplish this, efforts will include engagement with experts; conceptual model development; study design and measurement development; data collection and analysis; dissemination of findings; and archiving data.
Using Implementation Science in Supporting NC's Division of Child and Family Wellbeing Child Behavioral Health Team
The DCFW Implementation Support Project for the DHHS Child Behavioral Health Leadership Team (federally funded component) and its projects continues to build on the existing partnership that the Impact Center has with the CBH team at DHHS. The partnership creates an implementation science, practice-based set of activities and capacity building efforts in support of a multi-tiered policy/governance, program (e.g., EBP) support, and delivery system across North Carolina. Beginning July 01, 2023, the Impact Center will continue to work alongside and receive directions from DCFW Leadership, embed implementation science best practices within the Team, its projects, and support system partners where directed.